I just saved imported a memory card full of photos via Lightroom cc. I saved them on to an external hard drive (a connected Drobo S).

After importing the photos I noticed that I made a spelling mistake in the name of the folder of those photos, so I corrected it. Naturally Lightroom put a question mark beside that folder so I successfully pointed it to the renamed folder. The folder opens in Lightroom and all of its photos display properly in Lightroom.

However, when I tried to import my second memory card full of photos, Lightroom displayed an error message stating "The destination folder ... (previous folder's location, name, etc.) is not available. Using "Pictures" folder instead." and it required me to click on "OK."

In the Import dialog box, it showed the "Pictures" folder as the destination. When I tried to change it to the external storage device (my Drobo) it no longer shows up in the "Device" list. Lightroom obviously can "see" the Drobo because it shows it in the "Source" list. What can I do to fix this? I've been trying workarounds and fixes for 1-1/2 hours and have gotten nowhere.

Clearly it is looking for the folder whose name I changed.

Please help. Adobe support is closed for the weekend and I need to import the photos to my Drobo.

Not sure what you mean by "device" list but all you should need to do is to click on the two little triangles to the right of the name of the destination drive in the top right corner of the import screen and select "other destination.." and navigate in the standard operating system file picker you'll get to the location you want to import. If you don't get a popup here, make sure you have "copy" selected in the top middle.

The Drobo drive does show up in "About this Mac --> Storage," and it is not full. Furthermore, the Drobo drive also shows up in Lightroom CC in the "Source" column, as do the many folders (1,312) that I have created to store the photos (usually one folder per camera memory card, and the enclosed photos still show up and are still editable in "Develop." The only problem is that the Drobo drive no longer shows up in the "Devices" list when I try to assign a target drive for my next camera memory card download.

The Drobo drive does show up in "About this Mac --> Storage," and it is not full. Furthermore, the Drobo drive also shows up in Lightroom CC in the "Source" column, as do the many folders (1,312) that I have created to store the photos (usually one folder per camera memory card, and the enclosed photos still show up and are still editable in "Develop." The only problem is that the Drobo drive no longer shows up in the "Devices" list when I try to assign a target drive for my next camera memory card download.

I asked if it shows up in the File Manager program for your OS, that would be Finder since you are on a Mac. Not in About this Mac.

What do you mean by Target drive? Do you mean in the Destination area? Where you want to Copy the images to on import?

There is no Devices heading in the Destination area, at least not on Windows 7. Only in Finder do you see the heading Devices. If the Drobo isn't showing up in Finder then OS X can't see it. It has either been disconnected, gone to sleep or died.

Show us a screen shot of the right hand panel of the import dialog window. The panel that has Destination as a heading.

I am self-taught on Lightroom, and not very good at it yet. One of the things I do after I select "Import" in Lightroom CC is select my destination drive as "Other" after clicking on the "to Macintosh HD" icon and text in the upper right-hand corner of the Lightroom CC screen. Somehow changing the folder name of the folder that I had just saved a memory card full of photos to, even though I redirected Lightroom CC to the folder with the revised name, confused Lightroom CC, forcing me to approve the "Pictures" target destination, which I did not want to use.

Your suggestion prompted me to look down the bar that runs to the right of the large thumbnails screen. In the "Destination" section I found that all of my connected external drives are listed, including the Drobo. I clicked on Drobo and was able to see the list of all the main folders on that (massive -- 18TB) array of five drives. Then I clicked on my "PHOTO XFERs" folder. I scrolled all the way down to the new folder that I had created for my next transfer of photos from a camera memory card -- and Lightroom CC accepted that! Eureka. I was then able to do my usual stuff in Lightroom to set up the metadata for the transfer and start the transfer. The transfer was successful. You are brilliant! Thank you!

Now I have one more question which you might know the answer to. After transferring my cameras' memory cards (XQD and Compact Flash from two different Nikon cameras) two files were created for each photo: the .NEF (Nikon RAW image file) and an .xmp (sidecar?) file. Why is that second file created, and is that a good thing?

Thank you for your help. Fortunately a previous suggestion put me on the right train of thought (see my previous reply) and the problem was solved. I was looking in the wrong place for my destination drive (the Drobo S). Unfortunately I only have a little knowledge of Lightroom and, as they say, a little knowledge is dangerous. Again, thank you.

One last question. In my email's inbox (Time Warner Cable's Road Runner) I am only receiving my end of the comments about this issue. How can I set it up in the future so that I am notified when people reply or for issues that I am interested in following. I cannot seem to find a place to request notifications. I am using the current version of Lightroom CC, if that matters.

Aha, I thought you were looking in the wrong area. The devices list on the left is for the sources where to import from. On the right is where your images are going to end up after importing.

Now I have one more question which you might know the answer to. After transferring my cameras' memory cards (XQD and Compact Flash from two different Nikon cameras) two files were created for each photo: the .NEF (Nikon RAW image file) and an .xmp (sidecar?) file. Why is that second file created, and is that a good thing?

The xmp file is what is called a sidecar file and it can store settings and keywords applied in Lightroom as a backup of what Lightroom stores in the catalog file. My guess is that at some point you enabled "Automatically write changes into XMP" in File->Catalog Settings->Metadata. This is not the default but can be handy as a backup. It does slow down Lightroom if you do this though and I generally tell people not to bother if they don't really need it.

Email notifications are set up in your account preferences. On this forum on the right top you should see an icon representing you (the blue person) with an orange number. Click the little triangle and select preferences. There you should find all emailing preferences.

Thank you for explaining about .xmp files, but I still can't decide. On the one hand, I would rather be safe than sorry, but I would know what to do with the sidecar files if I ever needed them. Also, having Lightroom create the sidecar files after it transfers the RAW images from my camera memory cards adds significantly to the time that it takes to transfer up to 1,700 RAW images from my cameras' memory cards. Still, if I lost the use of my catalog it might be nice to not have to recreate whatever is in the sidecar files -- right or not particularly?

As for the complete lack of email replies to my questions on this forum, I had already guessed correctly and done what you suggested. Everything except "Quick Tagging Mode," something about high contrast colors and "Content Stream" was already turned on. I have now turned on everything except high contrast colors, but what I added should not affect email notifications. I also checked my email account and can tell you that no notifications from Adobe ended up in my Junk mail folder. This is odd.

The information in the xmp sidecars will be read by camera raw when you open the raw file in Photoshop directly and you'll see the same changes you did in Lightroom. Also when you import the files in another Lightroom catalog, the xmp will get read and all your edits will be visible. It's an OK backup of your edits. However, if you backup your catalog regularly (as Lightroom does by default) I doubt it adds that much. You can also always manually trigger that xmp files get written by selecting the images you want this to happen to in Lightroom and then go to the metadata menu and hit "save metadata to files" or hit command-S. That way you don't have the performance hit of the constant writing of these files but you can still generate them if you are done with a folder of images for example and have a backup of your edits.